The Tale of the Five Omnibus

  The clicking noise behind him brought Herewiss’s head up. He didn’t turn, but threw himself sideways and rolled. Only that saved his life, as the razory claws came down on the marble, one of them snapping with the force. He heard the crack of it right by his ear.

  Herewiss was up, and Khávrinen was flaming like a torch, showing him what he had expected, and worse. Fyrd! had been his first thought as he rolled. Now he looked up at the keplian as it reared, seeing the wicked glitter of hating intelligence in its eyes. Thinking Fyrd, he corrected himself, as he feinted with Khávrinen, threatened the keplian back. There was nothing unusual about keplian as such. They were a standard enough kind of Fyrd, yet another of the beasts the Shadow had ruined during the time of the Catastrophe. They had been horses once. But keplian had been twisted into carnivores, with carnivores’ teeth, and instead of hooves there was one great claw on each foot, and two lesser ones on each side of it. The body was lean and starveling, the eyes like cats’ eyes, placed forward instead of at the sides of the head. They were hunters, plagues of the herd country. And this one was one of the Shadow’s own breed, not mere dumb beasts but almost as intelligent as humans, and hating humans like nothing else—one of the kind of Fyrd Héalhra and Éarn had given their lives to wipe out. They had been wiped out indeed, until now: until a man had the Fire again, and old challenges were renewed. These thinking Fyrd were a message intended by the Shadow for the Goddess… but addressed to him.

  And what is it doing in a city? Herewiss thought, as the keplian lunged at him again, and he struck it upside the head with Khávrinen, and it shied back screaming hatred and pain. Though he knew perfectly well. Rian had sent it. Rian had some connection with these things; Herewiss and Lorn and the others had seen that clearly enough at Bluepeak just now, where the field had been full of them. Amusing to find that he was being so closely watched. The image of that rider wheeling off and carrying word up to Kynall was in Herewiss’s mind now. Wasting no time, are we, he thought. Striking the first blow. Always an advantage in a game.

  Well, we shall see about that.

  They were circling one another now, the keplian’s horrible half-horse, half-bear mask wrinkling in a mixture of anger and fear. It should have killed him with that first stroke. It now saw no chance of doing so, for Herewiss had the Fire, and there was no Fyrd alive that did not go in deadly fear of the blue Flame of Power. This one knew Herewiss would kill it if it couldn’t kill him. He could feel its fear like his own. Pity washed through him—The keplian leapt again, and Herewiss dived and rolled and came up with Khávrinen pointing at the thing. Blue Fire lanced out, but not to kill. The keplian fell over sideways on the marble floor, struggling, then frozen entirely as the nerve-seize gripped every fiber of it. It lay there, rocking ever so slightly, like a dropped stone: then became still.

  Herewiss stood there gasping. Let it lie so, he thought, anger and satisfaction beating in him with his heartbeat as he watched the raging eyes go wild, though they could not move; as the lungs struggled for air and could not find any. A more merciful death than what it had in mind for me—

  The silence reasserted itself. “And as for You—” he started to say.

  And paused.

  Paused.

  They were horses once, he thought.

  He drew a few breaths, and then dropped to his knees in front of the keplian. It stared through him, desperate, horrified, not even its eyes being able to change focus as it lay there slowly strangling. Herewiss tucked his heels under him, laid Khávrinen across his knees, and took the keplian’s great ugly head between his hands. He released the muscles of its lungs. Air sucked into them in a long anguished gasp, blew out, sucked in again. Fear, fear, fear beat in the air like another pulse. Herewiss paid no attention to it for the moment. He shut his eyes and gathered the Fire inside him, forced it to concentrate and concentrate until he could see nothing of his own inner workings in his mind’s eye but that searing blue. He looked at the keplian then, and at its own inner being: not the cruelly twisted mind and heart of it, but the bone and brawn, the sinews and nerves and blood and muscle, taken all together. Taken together they seemed all quite different, but far down in all their structures, buried, he could sense and see the tiny, tight, coiled pattern on which and with which all the greater structures were built—the Goddess’s own plan, writ small in every drop of blood and every hair. Someone had been at that plan, had rewritten parts of it with horrible malicious cunning, so that what should have been a horse now grew fangs, craved blood, tore and was torn.

  But what had been written could be rewritten.

  What use in doing it once? Herewiss thought, in a moment’s despair. Change one Fyrd, what difference does it make?

  Still better than killing. Killing serves no purpose but that One’s satisfaction.

  And he paused again. Death was no use. Change was no use either.

  But rebirth, he thought. It might—it just might—

  He looked closely at one of those tiny coiled messages, the keplian body’s own reminder to itself of how it was built and should keep being built. If one were to change this, and this, Herewiss thought, and this here—so that the next time this creature mates, the foals are keplian no longer—Fyrd no longer. And to make sure the foals carry the shift too, so that when they mate with other keplian, or even with horses, or each other, the shift back toward horseness will still continue—

  There were many, many changes to be made. But Herewiss was outside of time at the moment; nothing mattered but the blue blaze of Power within him, ebbing and flowing with the remote deep-voiced wash of his pulse, no longer a drumbeat but the long soft singing rhythm of waves washing up on some bright Shore. He slipped himself down and down into that tight-coiled ballad of blood and bone, made a change here, shifted a verse there, rewrote the sense of another verse entirely; eyed his work, corrected it, made another change, and another. Then after an endless time, when everything else seemed in order, he set in place the final verb that bound it all together and made it work—

  He drew within himself again, let the Fire ebb a bit, opened his eyes, blinked. He could feel the change spreading inside the keplian, one version of that song overwriting another, the whole creature turning to one chorus of change. He waited until the uproar died down, listened one last time to be sure of his handiwork—then let the keplian go.

  It gasped, and blinked hard, then lurched and stumbled to its feet, unsteady as a new foal. Herewiss got up too, rather hurriedly, with Khávrinen ready in case there should be need.

  The keplian stared at him… and shifted oddly from foot to foot, as if its claws suddenly felt peculiar to it.

  Herewiss breathed out, feeling something strange: jubilation. Triumph. “Go free,” he said, looking back in mind to a stretch of empty country that he and Moris had ridden through that morning. “And Her blessing on you and yours, mad and sane together. Go.”The keplian snorted. Blue Fire flickered around it; it was gone.

  Herewiss breathed out, then, and felt like sagging. How many hours of life, for that? he thought. How many months?— But there would be time to worry about that later. He turned to Héalhra’s statue, sketched it a bow, and turned again and walked out the doorway.

  There he paused and took stance, resting Khávrinen’s point on the stone, resting his hands on its hilts. Slowly the Fire wreathed up about it, and him, until Herewiss stood in a bonfire of it three times his height. The light of the blue Flame blazed up so that the whole square was alight with it, as if a star had fallen onto the paving. In his exultation and anger, Herewiss neither knew nor cared who might be seeing the light. The light itself was what mattered.

  “Go and tell your Master,” he said into the night, “that better than such poor blunt tactics are needed for me. I have come to mend what was marred. My weapon is in my hand now, and though it break on what it touch, yet what it touches will be made whole in its destruction. Go you and tell Him that: and also that he has nothing so simple and straightforward as mere
defeat to look forward to—no more than do His slaves, who will be freed—one way or another. Go now and tell Him so!”

  And then Herewiss let the breath go out of him, shocked by the power that had made its way into his voice. The naked exultation drained away as well, replaced by awe and unease. He had been the one who had started speaking. He was not at all sure that he was the one who had finished.

  Echoing his mood, Khávrinen’s Fire burned down, burned low. Slowly and thoughtfully Herewiss sheathed it, turned, and began walking back to the Darthene embassy. He could hear Freelorn saying to him, not so long ago, I don’t want to be a god….

  And do I? Herewiss thought. Do I?….

  SEVEN

  The Goddess folded Her arms and looked at the atheist with bemusement tinged with annoyance. “This is getting us nowhere,” She said. “I do godly things right here in front of you, one after another, and you say they’re mere sorcerer’s work, hedge-magic. What work is going to be big enough to convince you?”

  The atheist looked dour. “You could appear in your full glory,” he said.

  “It would kill you,” the Goddess said, though Her voice was sufficiently irritated at the moment to suggest that this would not be entirely an unsatisfactory outcome.

  “Hah,” said the atheist. “All that means is you can’t do it.”

  “Won’t,” the Goddess said. “I’ve heard that line before, and I know What put it into your head. It’s the Shadow’s counsel. Do you think I started being self-existent yesterday? What good are you to Me, blasted out of existence? Glory has its uses, and that’s not one of them. No, you’re just going to have to accept Me as I am… as you do your fellow human beings.”

  “As you are,” the atheist said, looking Her up and down, “I don’t believe you. Nor believe in you.”

  “Or in them either,” the Goddess said, smiling a crooked smile. “And I think I know how they feel.”

  The Goddess and the Atheist, 5

  Freelorn had heard it said often enough that eventually, a criminal will return to the scene of his crime. Not considering himself a criminal, he had to laugh when it happened to him as well.

  He spent some days working his way up out of the empty country near the mountains, considering his options. He took his time riding along; there was a lot of time for thought as he watched the mountains slide away behind him at last, slipping below the horizon. And the countryside itself disposed him to take things slowly. It was often rocky, juts of shale or slate coming up out of the ground, sudden pits opening, and the ground boggy or full of molehills and sinkholes. He let Blackie pick his way, and didn’t rush him.

  Lorn tried hard not to think. He had been doing so much of that lately. He tried just to be one with the landscape, the wind, the sky, the rivers he crossed. Those rivers were the first sign that he was coming into country where people lived. Down this far south, for the first couple of days of riding, the land he traversed was mostly good only for sheep; the pasture was too sparse for cows, all heather and bracken. But the stoniness began to fade out of it, and he started to cross the little streams that fed the Arlid from the west. The land went from ridges and corries and valleys into more subdued, rolling country: greener, lusher. Once or twice he came across the drystone walls of old farmsteads, gone now. Whatever family had ventured so far south was now vanished, for whatever reason.

  He stopped near the ruins of one old farm building and looked around it, half-afraid he would find the black scars of fires on the stones, sure sign that the Reavers had been here. But there were no such marks. Mere abandonment had ruined these buildings; small sapling trees were growing through the tumble of stones and slates where the roof had been. Someone had found that they just couldn’t make a go of it this far south; not enough cities, not enough small towns, to take their produce to market to. Lorn shook his head, and rode on north.

  It would be nice if we could settle some people down here. Help them with money, for a while, until they got their crops in…. got their pasturage tilled and well founded. It really would be good land for cattle, once you got some decent grass on it…. He remembered his father talking that way on many a ride out of Prydon. Half the time talking to his father had been like talking to a farmer; an agricultural expert full of tips on how to keep the clubroot out of your turnips. Rather like Eftgan, he thought. But then that was what kings did—put food in people’s mouths. It was a business Lorn was going to have to learn from the sharp end, as they said in the country. He had not been doing too well at it until now.

  The country continued to soften around him, his third and fourth days after leaving Eftgan at the borders. By his reckoning he was about ten leagues south of Egen, the nearest biggish town on the Arlid. He thought he would stop there for a while, on his way north, get his bearings and some news. But he was in no rush.

  When he came to his first real hamlet, he was stricken almost dumb with astonishment. After days out in the wilderness, the sight of anything domestic—a cow, a house, a man—was a startlement. Or so he found. He had always had his people with him, before; now he only had this silence, this loneliness. It changed everything, made any human being seem an event. Possibly it was a change for the better, since certainly that was how the Goddess saw things.

  The one cow he saw was one of the handsome brown South Arlene breed, with its big eyes and sweet face. Its horns had been polled, and each one capped with a piece of carved bone decorated with flowers. He saw this directly, because as he passed the hedged and stonewalled field where the cow was cropping its grass, it stopped and stared at him in vague amazement and wandered over to the wall, and mooed at him.

  It was late afternoon: milking time, Lorn thought. The whole scene was bathed in lengthening golden light; the cow’s shadow, and the wall’s shadow and the shadow of the trees at the far side of the field, lay out long behind them. Overhead a lark was climbing up wing over wing into the sky, twittering. There was no other sound but the soft breathing of the cow, and Blackie’s and Pebble’s breath, and the slight clanking of the pots on Pebble’s back when he shifted feet. Lorn sat there and reached down. The cow whuffled at his hand, chewing.

  He looked out across the field. I could stay for a long time in a place like this, he thought. Nothing much to do. Feed the cow— He laughed. “Nothing much to do—” On a farmstead so far from anything, survival would not be an easy matter. Even growing enough hay would be a challenge. And this was lonely country. Who knew whether, after a trip to the nearest market town, you would even find your home unburned when you got back? Not just because of Reavers—there were raiders of the Arlene kind, too.He rode on, over the brow of the hill that was part of the cow’s field. The cow ambled on after him in an abstracted manner. Lorn paused at the hillcrest and looked down to see a farmstead, very plain—farmhouse of fieldstone roofed in slate, with several outbuildings, and stone walls surrounding it all and making a yard. There was in fact a house beyond that farmhouse, and then another farm, and several small cottages scattered between them.

  He rode down into it, toward the rutted strip between fields that seemed to be the main street. Pebble’s pots clanked softly as they made their way down the hill. Shuttered windows stood open to the warm summer air. He saw a face look out of one and see him coming. The expression the woman wore was wary at first; then it relaxed when she saw the second horse, with the pots.

  By the time Lorn made it down into the dusty track between the houses, they were all waiting for him, everyone who wasn’t out in the fields: cautious-looking women, peering out of their doorways: wide-eyed children, staring at the stranger. Lorn remembered how he and his foster-sisters had stared at any new arrival in Elefrua, and smiled; but he wasn’t entirely at ease. There was a nervous look about some of the children, and it troubled him. “The Goddess’s greeting to you this fine afternoon,” Lorn said as he reined Blackie in, “and my own with it. I have pots, and I mend them: and I come looking for trade, or hospitality, or both if you have them.”
br />   “Where have you been?” said the woman closest.

  Lorn swung down out of the saddle, narrowly missing a chicken which had been strolling among Blackmane’s legs and scratching about, unconcerned. “Darthen, madam,” he said, “and eastward to the Stel.” All true enough, as far as it went, but he was not likely to mention how much farther east he had gone. The Waste was unlucky to talk about, even here.

  “Do you have the news?”

  “A fair amount of it,” Lorn said, and smiled. “There’s been battle at Bluepeak, and the young king’s coming back. But there’s plenty of time to tell you all that. Perhaps one of you have a stable I might sleep in with my horses tonight?”

  There was an immediate embarrassed outcry, the aggressive courtesy of country people in this part of the world, at the idea that even a tinker should sleep in the straw: there was a bed at Lasif’s house going spare, with a room to itself, and a door that shut, and come this way, sir, and what do we call you? —for here as elsewhere, real names were not lightly inquired after. “They call me Arelef,” Lorn said, lifting his saddle- roll and pack off Blackmane. It was a common enough nickname for a traveler, meaning “footloose” in the vernacular; though in the more ancient dialects of Arlene it meant the young “unprided” lion who was still wandering around in his growing time, gathering experience and strength. Very few people would know that these days, and Lorn felt secure enough to allow himself the joke.

  He allowed himself to be drawn into one of the nearby houses. Lorn touched the doorsill in blessing as he went through, and caught an approving look or two from the men and women who accompanied him; the gesture spoke of a country upbringing to them, of someone who knew how to behave. They brought him into the kitchen of the house—it was a sign of the success, or tenacity, of the people who lived here, that the house even had separate rooms. This room was airy and wide-windowed, with bunches of herbs hanging in the light and air by hand-twined hempen strings; and iron pots and a copper one, polished to a high shine, hung from hooks by the fireplace. There was an iron crane in the fireplace, well made, and the flags of the floor, polished from who knew how many decades of use, looked newly scrubbed. The people sat him down at the big scrubbed table in the middle of the kitchen, and gave him bread, the “half-brown” maslin bread of the south country, and some oatcakes on a stoneware plate, with a lump of sweet butter the size of his fist, and buttermilk from that morning’s churning.